Marked by religion
SIS surveillance of New Zealand Muslims is causing resentment at a time when a manipulative terror movement is looking for global recruits as it retreats on the battlefield. Yasmine Ryan reports.
The phone rang while he was at home watching a movie. The caller wanted to have a coffee with him. He said he was from the Security Intelligence Service, but Khaled* was sceptical.
‘‘I thought it was a joke,’’ said Khaled, who is in his early 20s. ‘‘But the man told me to look up the SIS number in the phone book, and when I called to verify his name, they said it was true.’’
Since then, members of the SIS have met Khaled on at least four occasions. He said he understands why. He’s a Libyan-New Zealander, and spent several months visiting his city of birth, Benghazi, in early 2011. The rebellion kicked off a few days after he arrived there, and, like most other young men in the town, Khaled took up arms to help defend the town when forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi rolled in to quash the uprising.
‘‘I know they are keeping an eye on me, but I don’t mind,’’ Khaled said. ‘‘It’s better for the community. Obviously lots of other people were giving them information, they knew more about the community than I did.’’
The SIS officers who interviewed him were always white men, in their late 20s or early 30s. They used a sprinkling of Arabic words, like ‘‘jihad’’ and ‘‘Daesh’’ – the Arabic word for Isis – as they sipped on flat whites while they quizzed him for information, usually for about 30 minutes at a time.
‘‘One guy kept using the word ‘Mukhabarat’, ‘‘ Khaled said. ‘‘He said ‘Don’t worry, we’re not the Mukhabarat’.’’
‘‘Mukhabarat’’ is Arabic for intelligence services, and in many Arab countries, they are notorious for their brutality and impunity.
There are also several recent cases of Muslim New Zealanders being taken aside for questioning at the airport in a way they argue is intrusive. Two Tunisian-New Zealanders, who spoke under the condition of anonymity, said they had each separately been stopped at Customs. Both are universityeducated, involved in community groups, and say they have no criminal record.
On each occasion, they were questioned extensively about where they had travelled, why they went, and who paid for their travel. The men recently used the Official Information Act to request the files on the Customs interrogations. The section on why they were selected for questioning is blacked out, so they still don’t know why they were targeted.
The first man is aged in his late 30s, and was stopped for the first time at Auckland International Airport when returning from a regular holiday to visit family back in Tunisia. The questioning lasted two hours, and he wasn’t allowed to communicate with family who had come to pick him up.
He said the Customs official fixated on the fact that he was born in Saudi Arabia before his parents migrated to New Zealand (the wealthy Gulf states are a common source of employment for Tunisian professionals).
The officer also seemed to find it suspicious that he would visit Tunisia, which last year was attacked three times by Isis supporters. The man struggled to explain to the official that he has made the trip regularly for years, to enjoy the summer holidays with family there.
‘‘He asked three times, ‘why are you travelling to Tunisia’,’’ he said. ‘‘Their tactic was to piss me off, and I fell for it.’’
He was treated to a repeat experience when he arrived back from a backpacking trip in southeast Asia in late 2015.
The other man, aged in his late 20s, was stopped twice last year when he was returning from holiday in Tunisia.
‘‘It’s a very humiliating process. And it feels we are treated as guilty until proven innocent,’’ he said.
He was told the searchers were looking for ‘‘objectionable material’’, and he was upset to learn in the report he obtained under the Official Information Act that they had gone through photos of his wife on his phone and laptop.
Legislation set to be introduced this year would give Customs the right to require travellers to provide passwords and access to their electronic devices in certain circumstances, but this is not currently an obligation. Both men say, however, that they were not given the option of refusing to allow Customs access to their devices.
A few months later, he said, an SIS officer contacted him to request a meeting. He felt like he couldn’t refuse, and wasn’t given the option to bring a support person or lawyer.
‘‘I’d rather not be approached by them, it’s never comfortable being approached by the SIS,’’ he said. ‘‘And they weren’t upfront about why they approached me.’’
Other members of New Zealand’s diverse Muslim community interviewed confirmed that there is a general perception that the SIS keeps closer tabs on them than on most other New Zealand citizens. While many say they are willing to cooperate and are as keen as anyone to keep the peace, there is also a growing sentiment that their community is being stigmatised by security officers in the name of the war against Isis.
The SIS denied selecting people based on their faith or ethnicity. "We identify people of interest based on a number of factors, which could include something they say or some other behaviour," an SIS spokesperson said.
"We are also of the view that a collaborative approach with the Muslim Community is in the interests of both the Community and the NZSIS."
It feels we are treated as guilty until proven innocent. Tunisian-New Zealander
Ahmed Bhamji is chairman of the Mt Roskill Islamic Centre, the largest mosque in New Zealand. He said that ever since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, Muslim leaders here have willingly shared information with the authorities about anyone acting suspiciously.
‘‘Every two or three months, the SIS comes to visit me,’’ he said. ‘‘The congregation knows that we’ve given an undertaking that if anyone is causing problems, we will inform the authorities.’’
He said that there was no issue with the SIS monitoring people who are genuinely a potential risk. However, he believes that the security services have gone too far, by smearing the community as a whole as a potential threat.
‘‘There are certain things where they are going overboard,’’ he said. ‘‘Why create a monster that is not there? When you keep drumming on about something, you make it a reality.’’
Defence Minister Gerry Brownlee this week justified New Zealand’s prolonged role in the US-led coalition in Iraq on the grounds that an Isis sympathiser might conduct an attack on New Zealand soil.
‘‘New Zealand is not immune to the sort of lone wolf attack you saw in Orlando,’’ Brownlee told Radio NZ on Tuesday. ‘‘This is as much our war, as it is anyone else’s.’’
US investigators have said that – unlike attacks in Belgium, France, Tunisia, Lebanon and Turkey – there is so far no evidence linking Orlando gunman Omar Mateen to Isis command structures. A former lover of Mateen has told media that he believes the massacre was an act of revenge against Latino gays, driven by Mateen’s feelings of rejection.
Attacks by gunmen inspired by far-right political beliefs, such as the alleged murderer of UK MP Jo Cox, rarely trigger wider security fears or profiling in quite the same way.
However, two New Zealand men were this week convicted for watching violent propaganda videos produced by Isis supporters.
Niroshan Nawarajan, 27, and Imran Patel, 26, were sentenced in two separate cases at the Auckland District Court on Thursday. Patel was sentenced to three years and nine months’ imprisonment, and Nawarajan received five months’ home detention.
‘‘Tell John Key to stop being a slave to America and to get out of Iraq,’’ Patel shouted, as he was dragged out of court.
He had been found with footage of atrocities filmed in Syria, Iraq and Libya, including showing people being shot, beheaded and burned alive.
As well as distributing propaganda videos, Nawarajan walked into the US consulate in downtown Auckland in January wearing an Isis shirt, and asked whether the building was bombproof.
Security experts warn the USled campaign against Isis is itself driving the globalisation of the movement.
Abeer Saady, a London-based expert in Isis video propaganda and recruitment strategies, cautioned that its defeats on the battlefield in Iraq Syria and Libya, were pushing the group to pursue a more global strategy.
‘‘They are globalising their network, and they want people who feel like they don’t belong,’’ she said.
Early this month, CIA director John Brennan acknowledged that setbacks for Isis on the battlefield would likely push it to ‘‘intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda.’’
Saady warned that Islamophobia and heavy-handed tactics by Western security forces would only succeed in alienating the young demographic that Isis propaganda is primarily targeting.
She argued that Isis should be understood as a social movement or idea rather than as an organisation, noting its primary source of foot soldiers in the Arab world was disaffected young Sunnis.
‘‘You can’t bomb ideas, but you can empower people to challenge them,’’ she said, arguing that Western countries would do better to focus on promoting genuine justice and democracy in the Middle East and North Africa, rather than pursuing perpetual military campaigns.
‘‘When people are stigmatised and put on security lists, and mistreated, those people become trapped,’’ she explained.
She cites multiple British examples of young Muslims being radicalised after being cornered by British intelligence officers or police into giving information on their communities.
‘‘Because of the way the security officials treat them, they then become targeted by terrorist networks,’’ Saady said.
Research Global Security Institute think-tank has shown that Isis is skilful in exploiting injustices and offering ‘‘redemption’’ to troubled youths, tactics reflected in its successes in France.
Most of the Muslim community interviewed in New Zealand said they support security services when members of their community did demonstrate worrying behaviour. Several of those interviewed said they had concerns about Patel.
One man said he had attended a barbecue last summer where someone raised the issue of Patel’s hardline views, and three people present said they had informed the New Zealand authorities of their concerns.
However, there is outrage over the ‘‘jihadi bride’’ claims made by SIS head Rebecca Kitteridge last December and repeated by Prime Minister John Key. Their claims that women were known to be leaving from New Zealand for Syria to wed jihadi fighters later proved to be misleading.
‘‘It left a really sour taste in the community but because we’re a minority, we have to move on,’’ Ahmed Bhamji said. ‘‘We are lawabiding, peaceful, and committed to New Zealand.’’
Following the ‘‘jihadi bride’’ debacle, Chris Finlayson, the Minister in Charge of the SIS, held a series of meetings in mosques and Islamic centres around the country.
Aarif Rasheed, a lawyer and mediator, said that he raised the concerns of institutional stigmatisation at one such meeting in the Avondale Islamic Centre in March.
‘‘I conveyed the message that if you’re going to scrutinise us, but not other communities, then it makes us feel unsafe,’’ Rasheed said.
He acknowledged that there were some young people in the community who ‘‘are just floating’’, particularly if they are unemployed, but said the authorities should work in a more cooperative way with the Muslim community, rather exclusively than through police and the SIS.
‘‘The problem is that the SIS is showing up at people’s houses, even if they don’t have a rigorous enough criteria,’’ Rasheed said. ‘‘It taints the whole whole bridgebuilding if it’s all done through the police.’’
Names have been changed to protect identities